There were plenty of announcements from supporting vendors at the London TIP Summit (see above), and one that caught our eye came from software integrator Aricent. The company has partnered with Intel, Fairwaves and Baicell on an open reference design for LTE virtualized RAN. Many operators originally expected to start deploying vRAN for 4G expansion, but their plans have been set back by the cost and complexity of the architecture, and especially the costly, proprietary nature of current fronthaul solutions (to link the centralized baseband and the remote radio units). Indeed, Rethink’s most recent survey of almost 100 MNOs found that many operators would not even deploy vRAN for their first phase of 5G roll-out, especially if they fall into…